Posted on 08/16/2002 10:09:32 PM PDT by ejdrapes
This is why Africa gets the leaders it deserves
Matthew Parris
There was a woman who had whipped her hair into a sea of caramel spikes, which is hard to do with tight black African curls. There was a woman who had achieved a chemical blonde. There was a man in zips and a black leather coat — black on black — a batik skirt and new trainers, top of the range. There were men who had decorated their heads by mowing lines around the cranium, one in a crinkly, multicoloured crêpe-cotton shirt and rainbow plastic winkle-picker shoes, impossibly tight, cap worn backwards. He was trying to get upgraded into business class, inventing ludicrous stories. The Englishwoman doing the check-in for Air Gabon at Gatwick was having none of it, and stood her ground. She had 36 passengers to check in for the flight from London to Libreville, via Brussels. It took her a little more than three hours.
This was not her fault. Her passengers were waBenzi, the term used across West Africa to describe the successful: the people with money, power or influence; the people who drive Mercedes-Benzes. There being few roads surfaced or properly maintained outside the squalid towns and cities, they do not drive far, but they drive big.
My fellow passengers at Gatwick struck me as worth describing less as an exercise in travel writing (we all have our airport stories) than as an object lesson in the politics of development. For this was the elite, the commercial and administrative class through whom (short of the reimposition of colonial rule) both aid and advice from countries such as ours must be channelled. These were the rich. They must have been. They were able to fly to and from Europe. Some were from Gabon, many from Congo, and all had been shopping.
The word “shopping” hardly does justice to the industrial scale of this little crowd´s acquisitions. I have seldom in one place seen a collection of luggage at the same time so ostentatious, so expensive and so gross. They were leather or fabric-covered suitcases as high as a child, and more cube-shaped than case- shaped.
And everyone kept pushing in. We started in a queue — three whites scattered among the Africans — but by the time the whites got anywhere near the check-in desk we were the last three in the line. The man in skirt and trainers and his enormous wife simply barged. Others sidled. Some struck up loud conversations with those at the front of the queue, then pretended to be positioned there.
A man in dark glasses (indoors, at night) and two noisy female companions held up the whole check-in for about half an hour with an argument about how much excess baggage his party had (a mountain) then, failing to fool the check-in agent, affected to saunter off with his women and talk to someone else — to show he didn´t care — leaving his documents half-processed on the counter. This delayed the agent´s work until she coolly shoved his documents aside and received the next passenger — whereupon Dark Glasses, alarmed, pushed in front of a middle-aged man of scholarly demeanour and his unpushy wife — infuriating the couple to the point of pushing back in again. Meanwhile, Crinkly Shirt, having succeeded in pushing in so brutally that Decorated Head protested, came over all loud-laughs-and-handshakes and “what-a-card-I-am, eh!” — which, such was its swagger and sudden bonhomie, worked. Suddenly, everyone was wreathed in smiles. Another cheater got away with it.
At last they were all ready for passport control. And of course after that they all got lost again in the duty-free shops. The flight was delayed while missing passengers were paged, latecomers sauntering up to the departure gate with yet more purchases in big bags, leading to more arguments about hand luggage and more attempts to cheat. Found out, the capacity of these people to affect innocent shock and apparent ignorance of every rule was astonishing. The airline attempted a staggered boarding procedure but nobody took any notice, stampeding at the gate and on to the plane, whereupon a handful more passengers tried to pretend that they were business class and had to be moved from these seats, each professing the same total surprise at their eviction as they had shown at the news that flying involves weight restrictions.
The Dutch crew handled this with bemusement. Though our airline was called Air Gabon, the plane and its captain and crew seemed to have been hired from a Netherlands charter company. All the stewards looked like Tintin and showed as amused a command of Third World chaos as Herve’s young Belgian journalist.
One sensed among this European crew an unvoiced — professionally unvoiceable — scorn for these passengers. The crew was resigned to such behaviour and they were paid them to handle it. One sense, too, the calm confidence we have when observing the vanity of fools, that they will not have the last laugh.
We took off, landing in Brussels 38 minutes later. Decorated Head complained loudly, to the admiration of his women, that there had been no refreshments: “Ce ne’est pas gentil,” he said to a stewardess. Dark Glasses was prevented from disembarking with the departing passengers to get some beer. On his behalf, Crinkly Shirt began a huge row, storming up and down the aisle, shouting and swearing that Belgium was a racist country and lunging at the stewardess as if to hit her.
At one point he yelled that he would get a gun “and blow this plane up”, and soon had a faction among the passengers muttering and interjecting in his support; but the Tintins were unmoved, everybody calmed down, and we were soon airborne.
Truculence turned back to docility as suddenly as it had flared up, supper was served, Crinkly Shirt banged his tray and demanded more beer, and soon everybody was asleep. When we landed six hours later, all the passengers clapped. We escaped into Libreville, a gentle mess of a place. Anger, jollity, meekness, swagger, obedience, had passed across these waBenzi like sun and rain racing across an island, with such speed: momentarily warm, momentarily cruel, suddenly kind, suddenly innocent, suddenly corrupt ... I tried hard not to quote to myself that famous line of Kipling’s, and I won’t here. These were only the regular waBenzi, perhaps trying too hard. The super-waBenzi would have been flying on Air France, business class, from their boltholes in Paris and Nice. They are less conspicuous. Those are the waBenzi with whom governments deal. These — economy class on Air Gabon with me — were the ones whom businessmen, aid workers, doctors and travel agents must face.
From the picture, the object lesson, I have tried here to paint, I would like to draw your attention to a detail I think important. With the broad view — of the volatile, sometimes brutal and sometimes rapacious people who have an unfortunate habit of getting to the top in Africa — I think we are pretty familiar. With the warmth and talent — the fortitude, the ingenuity and the huge likeability of the little people, the common people, of Africa — nobody who travels there can fail to be familiar. So we tell ourselves that by some tremendous mischance this most worthwhile of human races is persistently badly led.
But is it mischance? I had watched Crinkly Shirt barging the queue with growing fury. When he succeeded I hardened my heart against him. Any European would. It would be hard thereafter ever to like or trust this man again. This was a white man´s reaction. His cheating and bullying had also annoyed and disadvantaged his fellow Africans.
But when, having won, he turned to his black victims, all smiles, joshed with them and held out an arm to shake hands, their frostiness melted. This fellow was a winner. He was behaving in a kingly manner. They were on his side again — what a bloke! Resentment fled, to be replaced by a wish to be part of the top dog’s gang. That is how the common people of Africa let themselves down; by letting their own leaders let them down. I’m afraid an instinct for justice requires a certain meanness of spirit, an ungenerosity, an unwillingness to forgive. It may also involve a resentment or begrudging of power. Such qualities are not entirely likeable.
The passengers on Air Gabon forgave their friend. He will therefore do it again. I am not confident about the New Partnership for Africa’s Development in which the Prime Minister is putting so much trust. I wish he and Clare Short had been with me in that queue.
LOL! It might be hell but I quite enjoyed it while I was there ;-)
"And when your goal is nearest, your hope for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen folly, bring all your works to nought."
Regards,
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